Nervous Device

Print campaign:
Review pursuits: SF Chronicle, Bookforum, Jacket, Big Bridge, Boog City, AWP Writer's Chronicle, Village Voice, Venepoetic, Galatia Resurrects, Boston Review, Rain Taxi, Poetry Magazine, American Poet, Bloomsbury Review, Brooklyn Rail, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, LA Times, NY Times, The Nation, New Yorker, Poetry Flash, Poets and Writers Magazine, St Marks Poetry Project Newsletter. We'll send to top poetry reviewers who freelance for the major publications that review poetry (New Yorker, NY Times, etc.): Adam Kirsch, Stephen Burt, David Orr, William Logan, Dan Chiasson, etc. Because she is an Iowa Writer's Workshop alum, we'll contact the Writer's Workshop, and we'll also contact the English dept. at Miami University (where she teaches). They should help spread the word among students, staff, and alumni. We'll send to the trades: PW, Library Journal, and Booklist.

Online and social media campaign:
Rumpus, Poetry Daily, BOMB, Silliman's blog, Complete Review, Constant Critic, Conversational Reading, Elegant Variation, Identity Theory, NYer's Book Bench, Bookslut, Shelf Awareness, Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads, Wikipedia

Radio: KPFA Cover to Cover, Writer's Almanac.

With Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner explores the boundary the poem marks between poet and audience on the map of desire.

In Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner takes inspiration from William Blake's "bounding line" to explore the poem as a body at the intersection between poet and audience. Using this as a figure for sexual, political and economic interactions, Wagner's poems shift between seductive lyricism and brash fragmentation as they negotiate the failure of human connection in the twilight of American empire. Intellectually informed, yet insistent on their objecthood, Wagner's poems express a self-conscious skepticism even as they maintain an optimistically charged eroticism.

"Wagner's fourth collection contains poems of memory and dark artifice. She writes with an obscure, magnetic lens. . . . Wagner contrasts these complicated poems with short, clean, pieces that offer a kind of breathing space for the reader. Not to be mistaken for trivial, the linguistic tightness of these poems are highlights of Wagner’s collection."—Publishers Weekly

"Taking with one hand what they give with the other, Wagner's poems are full of vehemence and disdain and tenderness and somewhere, in some inexpugnable part of the body of language through which so many discomforting feelings pass, a thorny kind of joy. This is my idea of great poetry: in which 'The actual is / flickering a binary / between word and not-word.'"—Barry Schwabsky, Hyperallergic

"Nervous Device is such a smart book. You never know where the poems are going to take you, or when some startling, often cringe-making image or thought will intrude. Unable to settle into a comfortable rhetorical space, these poems reject simple claims to knowing something or doing right or changing the world. Rather, they move like an erratic insect stuck in a language bell jar. Brilliant, and disturbing."—Jennifer Moxley

"Nervous Device, the human machine, palpitating inside its own little bounding lines. These poems do everything the human device does, vibrating like an electrified tornado inside a glass jar, and make this reader profoundly alive to huge swathes of being. There is no machine for mastering the self (yet), but there are Cathy Wagner's poems."—Eleni Sikelianos

"The poems in Nervous Device resonate with a knowing nod to time and the difficulty and struggle of being sentient and intimate—of loving while being human. This is poetry connectivty: sexy,...